Citing Your Sources
Most of the information you find will not be common knowledge, and you will need to
provide a citation.
So what is a citation?
As you learned, a citation is what writers provide not only to acknowledge their
sources of information, but also to help their readers find that original source
themselves.
So what does a citation include?
There are some obvious things, like the title and the date, but
other parts of the citation may not be so obvious.
What's an Author?
The person or group responsible for creating the information.
A person is obvious, but a group can be a group of
individuals or it can be an organization, like U.S. Department of Education or
the American Psychological Association. Occasionally you will not find an author
listed at all. |
What's a Publisher?
We usually think of book
publishers, but it is any person
or group responsible for
distributing the information or making it available.
The publisher can take many forms:
the journal that publishes an article, the Web site containing a Web page, the
company that makes software. |
What else?
Depending on the type of source, you'll need to include any number of things.
Article from a database: name of the database
Web site: Web address and the date you looked at the site
Movie: director
Music: performer or writer (if they are not the same)
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Sometimes you will come across sources that do not have all of the pieces of information
you think you need. Do your best. It is better to err on the side of too much information
than too little, but if you have any questions Ask A Librarian.
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